primaries. oregon is now operationally on the state level a mildly reliable democratic state. more variance within the republic primary so more opportunity for choice.
That may be a reason for registering R, but not for identifying as R. Unfortunately, voting causes identification; it’s difficult to separate these things. Also, I imagine that the Republican party in Oregon is much better than the national party.

I hate that the peoples of Britain and Ireland are called either Basque, Celts or Germans, as these are all modern entities, and didn’t exist at the time of the putative migrations or invasions. I would prefer terms like Iberian, or Central European…
These terms may be misleading, but they are not anachronisms.
OK, the term Basque is probably only two thousand years old, thus post-migration. And it probably never matched how it’s being used here. But the ancient use of Celt and German seem to be what’s being used here.
The modern term “German” is much narrower than the ancient, but I think most people understand that. I don’t see any problem with Celt at all. While the Irish are probably the only people who get called Celts today, I think the term is understood quite broadly, and people talk about, say, Celtic influence in France.
But maybe I don’t think they’re so misleading because I’ve already been mislead. In that case, please enlighten me!
One might object not on grounds of accuracy, but on grounds of precision. Iberian is more precise than Celtic, but Central European is less precise than German.
You require javascript to post? Disgusting.

pconroy,
Now I’m really confused. Your last comment makes it sound like you endorse the ancient usage and object to the modern usage. But isn’t it the ancient usage in “We’re nearly all Celts under the skin!”? Why did you write ‘invading “Celts”‘?

I believe that institutional organized religion, e.g., Christianity, Islam, etc., can increase the magnitude of a social vector, but has little influence on its direction. For example in relation to slavery religion was a force for inflaming both abolitionist enthusiasm and justifying the holding of other humans in bondage.
I agree that organized religion is unlikely to affect the direction, but how do you reach the belief that it can affect the magnitude?
Perhaps it’s just my ignorance of the history of slavery, but I don’t see evidence there. I see people making religious arguments on both sides, but that doesn’t seem like evidence of much at all: I explain it as the form that arguments had to take.
Maybe I see some connection between radical sects (eg, Quakers) and anti-slavery positions, but I don’t know what to make of it. Sorting is one explanation. Another is that the rare trait of acting on one’s professed beliefs caused both political and religious radicalism.

Here’s a common theory about how hedge funds manage to attract a lot of capital: they make very risky investments. Many of them go bankrupt. The ones that survive look very good, and attract more capital. But they were just lucky in the past and probably won’t be in the future.

Because no one knows how many funds there are out there, it’s really hard to see how well the typical fund does, to see if the above description is correct, but all the evidence is that it’s true.

Here’s an approximation to the EMH that is true: it’s really hard to tell who’s good and who’s merely lucky.

Inspired by John Roth’s comment, I wonder how much is intelligence correlating with simply knowing that scientists are against astrology.

AIDS & breast cancer are the only diseases with disproportionate NIH funding, I’m told.

Maybe I’m reading the wrong things into your comments, but it seems worth pointing out that if you’re willing to try non-firefox, you should be willing to try firefox w/o extensions, or firefox with 4 extensions.

Hedge funds are a lousy investment if you pay 20 and 2, but they give discounts to prestigious colleges so that they can brag about having them as clients. A diversified portfolio of non-fraudulent hedge funds with low management fees is a pretty good investment.

SAIC is public, NYSE ticker SAI; google finance responded well to SAIC, too.

But they only went public in late 2006.

Joseph Smith’s cult is the most exotic outlier 
 
Most exotic of the ones that survived, but, say, Oneida seems more exotic to me. And I think it an interesting example because it was tolerated in upstate New York. (I learned the comparison from David Friedman.) 
 
the nuclear family is an *eternal* unit in Mormonism 
 
I don’t know what you mean by this (perhaps you just meant “central”), but here’s something I heard that seems to contradict “eternal”: a woman claimed to have been told that she had to get used to polygyny because there would be a shortage of men in heaven; and that she shouldn’t worry about whether her husband would get in, just that she needed a proper marriage herself.

I’ll go with the explanation of ZBicyclist from the original thread: typo. A less plausible explanation is that SSA has a radically different methodology than the census. 
 
But the decline from census 1990 to census 2000 is surprising on its own. The total population of Schmidts is comparable to that decline, so that isn’t the answer. (+33 ranks for Schmidts is about 10% increase)

John Emerson, 
migration is 1-way; diffusion is 2-way. That’s what I would say is the difference. I’m not sure how I’d detect that from PCA.  
 
Also, migration is faster than diffusion. That should show up. An east-west migration would make the east-west genetic difference smaller, hence decreasing the weight of that component, making the north-south gradient show up first. I bet a lot of people would give the exact opposite interpretation.

Razib,
you seem to predict that if we isolated southerners, the correlation would go up. Is the data available to do that? (IQ, it seems, is not, but maybe education?) The diversity index you give might accomplish the same thing, but how to display it?

I think Haidt’s categories are useful, although I’m not sure about the liberal vs conservative claims. Even if disgust is merely something that liberals know shouldn’t have to do with morality, that’s an important difference.
(I’ve read an article & not watched the podcast.)
Haidt has a Ph.D. and I’m sure he can design good experiments
You have way too much faith in scientists.

why communists? why not other authoritarians?

That quote from ScienceDaily isn’t quite correct. In a twin study, pregnancy is a shared environment. In particular, this study seems like a blow to the pre-natal infection theory.

I think the key is whether the field builds on itself. The Elements are true, but you can find much the same material in high school. Maybe you would have been better off reading Euclid instead, but it’s too late for that. Sociology is faddish, but that means that whatever good it does is thrown out, so there may be much in old books that is not available in new books. Unfortunately, much bad stuff is in the old books as well; it’s probably not worth doing the filtering yourself.
There’s something to be said for the history of ideas. But not, I think, so much for primary sources. It’s nice to know that Archimedes invented the delta-epsilon proof and that calculus existed for 200 years without it, but now you know it. The less you trust people to understand the field and write surveys and histories, the more you have to read it yourself.
But if I want to understand the world, knowing the leading thought at various times may not be so important as knowing the common thought. Euclid isn’t going to tell me what percentage of the population could count. Primary sources in philosophy and social science will do a better job of indicating the common (or elite-but-not-specialist) thought, if only implicitly. Moreover, I think there has been a lot more change in common thought on philosophical and social issues than math and science. And it has a lot more impact on people’s actions. Plato seems to be a step backward from where I stand, but it’s a step in a direction I never would have considered, and a step forward from a truly bizarre place.

agnostic:
Population growth surely wasn’t: exponential starting around 1800, pretty static before then. Etc.
cite?
that’s certainly not the conventional wisdom, unless “pretty static” just means a smaller exponent. Also, I thought that there was a lot of population growth in Europe due to new world food before 1800, but maybe that didn’t affect world population so much.

The source seems to be Angus Maddison. He has a spreadsheet at his home page.
http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/Historical_Statistics/horizontal-file_03-2007.xls
He has western European population doubling from 1000 to 1500 again to mid 18th century.

A visualization of statistics question: are the income graphs the right thing to display, or should they be smoothed (or bucketed) first?
I’m sure that a smoothed version would be more pleasant, but would it make extracting information easier? and would it be worth the data thrown out?

georgesdelatour, 
there’s a key on the right side of the graph. (I missed it, too.)

I’d like to see a plot from 1952/1956. Sure, I believe the qualitative claim, but how much less correlation was there?

John Emerson, 
I see two complaints that you seem to make about the Polish race, which you seem to alternate between. It would be better if they were cleanly separated, particularly if you are really only making one of them. 
 
The first is that one shouldn’t use the word “race” for such fine gradations as Poles. I am certain that the common word used to have little connotation of size, but I am uncertain of the current usage. It may be that it shifted to very coarse divisions, particularly as they became important in America–perhaps this is even a regional usage. But it also seems possible that this history is propaganda intended to move the current definition. It is certainly an advantage of not using the word that one completely avoids wondering about its common usage. 
 
The second complaint is that the Poles are an artificial group, not a reasonable population to consider. So then I would say that the common usage is simply an error, on its own terms.

Can you define “ethical” to match society’s current use of IQ tests? Having done so, are you left with any ethical use of genetics?

My favorite Ponzi scheme is ant-farming.

John Emerson (or anyone else), 
what are the good features exaggerated in the three disorders you named? 
 
(The one that springs to mind is that mania is too much hypomania, which seems to be pretty much purely good. But classic bipolar is not just mania, but also depression.)

I would say that the difference between pathogens and carnivores is the relative number of generations of the predator and prey. Humans live similar times to megafauna, so African megafauna was able to keep up the arms race. But pathogens can reach virulence in a single host generation. 
 
But then it occurred to me that long incubation period, which may be necessary to prevent a virulent disease (of animals) from being only locally virulent, means a long life-cycle and thus a long effective generation time.

Razib,
the study cited in the Slate piece is obsolete. The paper below reproduces that affect, but then sees how IQ affects the regression. Adult height regains much of its big effect on earnings, but adolescent height seems to act largely through IQ (that is, earlier growth spurts correlate with IQ).
STATURE AND STATUS: HEIGHT, ABILITY, AND LABOR MARKET OUTCOMES
Anne Case, Christina Paxson
http://www.nber.org/papers/w12466

But what is there to do about it?

Ron didn't say "they're lying, so disregard all sex data," but proposed an alternative theory of who would benefit from which lies. It probably has testable consequences, but it sounds overfitted. I think it would be useful to find someone who has not read the post to guess which way the lies would go.

Yeah, that sounds almost opposite.
Causally, the article you point seems easier to explain than the one I point to. But I don’t see that the timing of the height growth spurt should have anything to do with the timing of the brain growth spurt, especially since the brain growth spurt is before puberty. Since the timing is different, it would take a longitudinal study to compare them.

What strikes me about those charts is that time widens the racial gaps. That is: whites only default quickly; hispanics have a constant default rate; and blacks are somewhere in between. The black pattern is what I’d expect; the other two seem pretty weird.

But how much money actually got spent? These are all 10 year pledges, right? But even the 1998 pledges, did those really happen?

Also, there’s the causality issue. Maybe the banks were awash in capital, knew that they had to make bad loans, and figured that they they might as well get political credit for it, too.

bioIgnoramus, 
Andy Razaf’s mother was African-American, ie, probably West African.

One man’s crap… There’s a long tail problem: if they could monetize the niche stuff, they’d win on volume. The problem is that they have less information about the niche stuff, so it’s difficult to figure out what to advertise.

Finally, I also wonder if the role of novel infection might be at work among the Somalis.
Sorry if I’m slow, but it seems worth spelling out that this is compatible with the vitamin D hypothesis, since D is relevant to the immune system.

michael vassar:
Frankly, people can learn to understand themselves and to deconstruct others much better than most do.
razib:
yes. one way to do it is to socialize widely with those who you have deep ostensible differences with. the problem with this is that there is psychic discomfort in having your presuppositions contradicted.
I’m skeptical that this is that useful. I think it will make you sympathetic and stop attributing their positions to evil, but beyond that I doubt it will help accuracy. (note that mv is also talking about understanding yourself)

I’m surprised you made the first graph, treating the difference as a proportion, since the absolute number is so shockingly constant.

Greg Mayer’s hypothesis seems psychologically backwards to me. If you substituted “nationalism” for “religion” no one believe it for a second.

The WSJ does not make the false claim.  
 
To say that Word won only because of monopology and bundling is false, but to say that they played a role is not. At least it is not immediately contradicted by any of the data you link to. I don’t find that data terribly convincing, either. The magazine ratings, user ratings, and market share don’t seem terribly related.

Yes, the 31 page report is the most detailed. Here are all its details: 
 
“To preserve traffic from search engines, make the headline and the first paragraph of  
every story free.  
 
Charge a micropayment of 10 cents to read a full article.  
 
Charge 40 cents for a daily pass and $7.50 for a monthly pass.  
 
Establish an annual pass for $55 with print subscribers getting the first year of full  
online access free, but possibly moving to 50 percent of the online price.  
 
Establish a 5-cent charge, also known as a pass-along fee, to forward an article unless  
the recipient already has a subscription.” 
 
It also talks about things other than Jornalism Online, like the idea that newspapers are better lobbyists than Google and should extort money through threat of anti-trust litigation.

John Emerson: Probably local newspapers will become even more shopper-like than they are already 
 
I don’t know what you mean, whether I’m agreeing or disagreeing, but that 31 page pdf, which was mainly not about this particular plan, says that there are several local newspapers that charge for access. One possibility is that they have a monopoly on local news, that lots of papers could charge for content. But national and international news may be more competitive and have to stay open. Still, if people start buying access to their local paper, that may bridge the penny gap.

the reality is rather simple, scientists dislike being associated with creationists in contexts where they seem to be giving creationists credibility.
So why aren’t they calling for a boycott of Lehigh U? say, a boycott of physics conferences held there? Yes, what scientists dislike is simple, but how they balance that is not.

as noted in sean carroll’s post
That’s true. I liked Chad Orzel’s post but it made me forget Carroll’s similar paragraph. That seemed like a reasonable way to frame the question (although I disagree with the answer to that question). I don’t like the paragraph about laundering money, but I agree with the conclusion, so maybe I just don’t understand the metaphor. But Zimmer’s post reads to me as a sulk.
J.J.E.,
I had read the disclaimer. But the physics department has no disclaimer, which is why I complained about physics conferences. I have a lot more sympathy with Zimmer than with Carroll. (despite my opinions on their posts)
Also, the Lehigh disclaimer really isn’t much. It hardly seems more than Wright’s disclaimer that C&Z don’t make much of.

Is there a reason for anyone of a similar mind to follow Zimmer, etc?
I can see the point of a boycott, but the first people didn’t call for one, so it’s not going to happen. There is some value in the publicity of these “warning shots,” but there is rapidly diminishing publicity to more people doing it. In particular, PZ Myers’s quiet exit looks worthless to me.

razib: 
i regularly see the 19th or early 20th century as the “turn around” date for the efficacy of the medical profession in increasing, rather than decreasing, lifespan. anyone have a citation from where this comes from? 
 
This is not the hard data you probably want, but Lewis Thomas’s memoir “The Youngest Science: notes of a medicine-watcher” begins with the transition in the early 20th century. He talks about how his physician father knew that there was practically nothing positive he could do to help the patients, but that his colleagues did intervene, to negative net result. here is a summary of these first few chapters (with titles like “1911 Medicine,””1933 Medicine,” “1937 Internship”) 
 
I second Fabian and Caledonian, among others on this thread. Vassar has proposed almost exactly the opposite theory, that people are evolved to respect priests and that doctors are priests. The evolved part is awfully specific; I can accept the second part while rejecting the first. There are some great parallels, like compliance: people acknowledge the authority of priests, but don’t actually obey all that much.

In the previous post you labeled one group “no college” but now you label it “no bachelors.” Are these intended to be the same group? The new label makes it clearly exhaustive, but I had interpreted “no college” to mean not even starting community college.
The not started college group is down to 50%, so if the complementary “some college” group has higher IQ, neither group can be average. Whereas bachelors are small enough that their IQ can move around while the complement stays fixed at average.

Does the imprinting information really give us enough information to deduce things about the reproductive habits, or are these just-so stories? A few years ago, Vassar tried to take this size differential and the social structures and conclude the sexes of the parents, but got it backwards. Tigers have more variety of mates; lions may have a few mates in a pride, but they’ll be the same the next year. Maybe competition within a litter trumps competition between litters, but it’s not obvious.

Generally, the bid/ask interval is the relevant statistic, not the last price. It is visible in your screenshot, 44-80. It is bizarre that the last price is not between them. Such a wide range suggests an illiquid market and little information, but it was just the temporary effect of the one purchase.

The dating preferences don’t seem relevant to me to the divorce rates. Yes, a lot of white women don’t want to date other races. More don’t want to marry other races. But why should this tell us about the ones who actually do? Maybe Omar’s comment explains why interracial dating doesn’t lead to marriage, but by the time people do marry, shouldn’t they be past that hurdle?

Dizygotic twinning is heritable and varies widely. Some people believe that monozygotic twinning is heritable, though the conventional wisdom is that it is not. One theory is that it can be triggered by the father, that there are inherited properties of the sperm that cause splitting. (while it is hard for the father to induce multiple ovulation)
It is not so rare to confuse MZ and DZ twins (really!), so it is plausible that we miss variation in MZ twinning when DZ is much more common, as is true in most populations. But if there were a population where MZ were more common, people would notice the sex ratio.

TGGP,

I guess 20 monkeys were tested with non-kin (solid circles) and 10 of them were also tested with kin (open circles), but that’s not quite what the text of the article says.

It’s clear what conclusion to draw from Sykes, but what does Genghis tell us? All we know is that his Y chromosome is widespread, not that it’s correlated with a name, right? So it could be that it spread via cuckoldry.

Some scholars hypothesize that interpersonal violence was more common, not less, among hunter-gatherers, because there was no central authority regulating conflicts.

Does your invocation of theory mean that you are not impressed by attempts to measure? Perhaps it is a topic for another post, but I would like to know your assessment of the attempts to measure violence.

I’m not convinced by this theoretical argument because, while a central authority would want to suppress local violence, it might want war.

I mentioned war in my comment, but I’m more concerned about interpersonal violence among hunter-gatherers. I’ve heard of many ways to measure this, with wildly different results. But maybe one should start with pushing measures of agricultural homicide back earlier. Do we know murder rates in Rome?

Here is the paper on web history sniffing, including the list of sites.

In what sense is Chagnon “science-oriented”? He looks to me to be doing the same thing as other cultural anthropologists, just reaching different conclusions.

It seems to me that in anthropology “science” is a political label and it would be good to get rid of it for that reason. I’m more concerned about statements like “Chagnon’s friends are scientists, so he’s right” or “Chagnon is right, so he’s a scientist” than this. In other words: “the scientists started it.”

That Wired article had too memorable a headline. A cursory search suggests that the Japanese bought 35 million phones last year, including 6 million smartphones, including 4 million iphones.

How good is the evidence for symmetry? For example, composite photos fail to distinguish between the symmetry hypothesis and the smooth skin hypothesis.

I was confused by the statement about Calhoun. I read it as referring to brand-name Unitarianism, the church of his president, JQA; which would make it false, since he attended his wife’s lax Episcopal church. It would have been clearer to me to repeat the word “Deism” of the previous sentence.

Yes, the Japanese are better dressed and generally spend more now than in 1990; and they are a lot richer in 1990 than in 1980. But there are a lot of unemployed youth who seem to a lot less happy than the unemployed youth in Europe.

But, yes, news coverage is biased by financiers.

Paul, this is a final b, while Berg is an initial b. I believe this pronunciation is standard German, while Bavarians probably pronounce it Hapspurg.

As I understand it, terminal b in standard German sounds like p to English speakers and probably to speakers Romance languages. Often this applies to a b at the end of a syllable as well, as in Habsburg. The sound is neither voiced nor aspirated, so it is a third sound, distinct from initial p and b; Germans can distinguish it from terminal p, though I can’t. Here is wikipedia, which doesn’t seem to agree with either of us.

There are lots of populations with high twinning rates. It seems suspicious to me that a gene for twinning should be first discovered in this photogenic population.

What is the situation with height?

I thought it was the same as with IQ: hundreds of unreplicated claims from GWAS. Hsu mentions failure of IQ replication, so he seems to be asserting height replication. Is it true?

For anyone who is, like me, suspicious of that wikipedia quote, here is the text of the Fourth Lateran council of 1215. Item 50 bans 3rd cousin marriage. Item 51 indicates that this reduced the prohibition by 3 (canon) degrees, so 6th cousins really were banned before.

Evidence for Domino’s theory is this comment at the skeptical post razib linked, claiming that the #6 reviewer (in 2007) was selling books on amazon, labeled as received from the distributor and never read.

Actually, that #6 reviewer was reviewing technical books, much more valuable (though illiquid) things to resell than HK’s. Domino’s suggestion of $125k is spread out over 5 years. Since the books are new, they’re probably going for more than $5, though.

People obviously get their politics from their parents. That seems to me much more actionable than nuance about nature vs nurture, but people ignore it.

Older people are more conservative than younger people, but they rarely try to impart their wisdom to the youth, rather than just saying “Someday you’ll agree with me.” Have they learned something or have their personalities just changed?

ohwilleke, yes, but aren’t Philippinos an exception? aren’t current immigrants pretty average? Or maybe they are temporary workers who shouldn’t be counted as immigrants?

Does anyone have a citation for those 3% and 4% numbers? At least that's an objective question.

Steve,

thanks for that clarification on the 3 and 4%. These numbers aren't important for your point, but I'm curious what they are.

Gabaix and Landier claim that from 1980 to 2003, S&P500 market cap and ceo compensation both increased 6 fold. Assuming constant P/E, this corresponds to constant percent of profits. They say that it is well known that executive pay grows like the cube root of the firm size, at any fixed point in time, but that the constant varies with time and is such that pay is proportional to the largest firm size.

Between 1993 and 2003, I found contradictory claims. This time series the percent of profits was the same (2.5%) at the end points, but much higher (4%) in 1999. Whereas, this paper on a larger set of firms claims that the top five executives moved from 5% to 10%. I thought it also claimed that CEO pay alone increased alone, but I can't find that anymore.

The standard survey on executive compensation is by Kevin J Murphy in 1999 (not to be confused by Kevin M Murphy). It has a graph showing both the time series for executive compensation and for the number of papers on the subject.

I have seen the claim that profits are back to pre-war levels. One change that may be of interest is that pre-war companies didn't have employee-executives. They were smaller and were run by their owners. So executives may well have retained a much larger percentage of profits, but not as salary.

I may be missing the point, but it seems worth pointing out that the Roundhead picture in wikipedia is from the 19th century and thus, perhaps, not reliable. The Cavalier pictures are a mix of contemporary and 19C.

Sounds like a definite improvement, but a drawback is that people would not take as seriously faces on a screen as they would people in the same room.

This claim would be easy to study in mock trials. Also, sometimes victims, mainly of sex crimes, are allowed to testify in absentia to avoid confronting the accused. I wonder if this has been studied?

Roman Polanski managed to win a libel suit in England without setting foot there. I don't know if he testified, though.

Complaining about his lack of numbers is a bit unfair. He does mention the effect of both victim and perp on execution.

Geographical concentration of finance is just like geographical concentration of any other business. People who have money they want managed all go to NYC, so money managers have to have an office there. This includes the above-mentioned Jim Simons, whose quants are all out on Long Island.

Also, bankers get raises by threatening to quit. The threat is a lot more credible in NYC than in Boston.

Whenever I see a time series involving college graduates, I guess that they as their population expands, they become more like the general population. That turns out not to be the explanation – the general population shifted to “always wrong.” In general, it seems to me worth graphing the aggregate data whenever one graphs demographic breakdowns, especially if the demographics are changing.

Razib, and what did you think of this approach to evaluating a new book by reviews? If I recall correctly, your plan was to read it if it reviewed better on Amazon than Feast, but it failed that test in the end. Did you read it because the earlier reviews were more positive? or were you caught up in the excitement of the release and unable to keep to the plan? Was the book as you expected from the reviews? Was it a good plan?

How clear are the details of English public school or navies? Do they match #12?

How does this differ from earlier GWAS studies? Older studies identified lots of genes, none of which replicated. If they don't explain why the earlier studies failed, why should we trust this study? (Maybe they do address this, but the abstract implies that there were no earlier studies.)

Yes, it's good that they were able to predict IQ in a separate sample, but only 1% of the variance. Those p-values for the 1% don't sound right to me.

How can they explain 40-50% if they haven't found the genes, but only have SNPs in linkage disequilibrium? Everyone who has these genes happens to have characteristic SNPs?

Maybe the linkage disequilibrium SNPs explains why other studies weren't replicated. One should expect different GWAS to point to different SNPs. But if the second study directly asked whether a SNP in the first was predictive, it should replicate. As far as I know, they fail even this test.

Steve,

this sounds like the kind of thing where you, personally, look at photos and tell us.

Let’s talk about Germans, not the English, because there is more data. Would the graph look very different for their descendents? In the end the slaves were slightly taller, and that has reversed today, but most of the gap at age 15 was due not to final height, but to speed of maturation. I believe that in America today blacks mature faster than whites.

Of course, the class part of the graph shows that maturation then was largely environmental.

(I assume that the graph is just males. If I recall correctly, in America, black men are almost as tall as white men, but black women are somewhat shorter than white women. If this graph is both sexes, then the change of the difference of final heights is large.)

Maybe Darwin is famous for inventing natural selection, but Wallace did that, too. Darwin is important for his thorough work on it.

There was a big fight of credit between Newton and Hooke about the inverse square law leading to Kepler's laws. But Newton wrote a book and won.

It is a common claim that Newton’s mysticism allowed him to postulate action at a distance. Actually, he didn’t like it, either, and said that it must be only a practical theory and not fundamental.

I was surprised how rarely the top single came from the top album.

fish, the numbers claim to have been surveyed after the year 2000, largely after childbearing.

As to the name, I have no sympathy for those who live by the sword. Physicians wanted the respectability of teachers, so they stole the name. They shouldn’t be surprised if nurses do the same to them.

For those who talk of “terminal degrees,” there is only one: the habilitation.

Lots of powerless bad speakers are on the circuit, too. eg, Ray Kurzweil speaks to lots of groups that would seem uninterested in what he has to say.

Actually, this company was already selling maternal blood screening for cystic fibrosis last year, and received an FDA complaint. What’s new this month is trisomy 21, which is ordinarily easier to test for, but apparently harder this way.

Is there any example of pharmacogenetics that is not about rate of metabolizing the drug?

Why not directly measure serum levels? This would catch unknown genetic variation in metabolism rates, interaction with other drugs, etc.

I believe that food trucks in good locations pay rent.

You can explain anything by assuming it fits the goals. Do owners have worse goals, or are they falling prey to marketing? Do the owners have the wrong goals, or do the breeders?

What effect will the split between US and UK standards yield? Can the UK make the dogs healthier without losing popularity?

Have you read Clinton's book on giving? Do you think he wrote it?

Your experience at the dealership is an example of salesmen not profiling. Why did they apply these tactics to a gringo? Do they not have enough white customers to bother learning other techniques?

While the WSJ doesn’t mention the fast decline of IE, its graph agrees with yours, though sandwiching FF makes it hard to read.

I’ve seen a lot of these graphs and they are usually quite sensitive to the particular website. I’m surprised your data agrees so well with StatCounter.

Bigger houses, especially when mandated by developers and / or zoning,

Developers and zoning are completely different. Zoning usually mandates large lots, not large houses. This produces artificial scarcity to drive up the price and keep the poor out. Developers want large houses, close together. In CA, the cost of the house is small compared to the cost of the land. And, as you always say, a large house is cheap if you're willing to put lots of people in it.

Steve Hsu @41, I think it is important to distinguish between unconscious discrimination and quotas. They could both be true, but unconscious discrimination doesn’t seem relevant once there is a quota. The claim in that quote is that Stanford was surprised to discover that it was holding Asians to a higher standard. That seems to require it not to have a quota. Of course, there are complicated possibilities, such as some admissions officers being unconscious of a quota enacted by others.

Silicon Valley: In Steve Hsu’s comment thread, Yan Shen quotes the book “The Chinese in Silicon Valley.” It says that of the top 150 companies of SV, 10% had Asian CEOs (including Indians) in 1999. But the percentage of high tech firms in general is much higher and much more Chinese than Indian. I find implausible the claim of 20k Chinese engineers and 2-3k Chinese high tech CEOs.

The book has a lot of statistics, but they are badly organized, alternating lumping and splitting, absolute numbers and percentages, different years, etc. I don’t trust that the author correctly describes them, but his sources might be useful.